Word: ho
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...Ho Chi Minh is a poet: Suddenly I hear the autumn flute sounding coldly like a signal on the screened hillside...
...seizes a ready opportunity. But Indo-China was a place where one man was already waiting, a man who had spent 30 cunning, tortuous years preparing the event, weaving, dodging, converting reverses into successes and eventually triumphing. That man was a strange, blazing-eyed consumptive who called himself Ho Chi Minh...
Autumn Flutes & Saliva. "Have you met Ho Chi Minh?" an anti-Communist Vietnamese was asked. "Oh yes," the Vietnamese replied, quickening involuntarily. "He is the living example of a revolutionary. He has a blameless private life. He dresses simply. He is intelligent. He speaks French, Russian, English, Chinese and Vietnamese. He is very clever: when he speaks to the people he is direct so that an eight-year-old child can understand. He has infinite patience. He has sacrificed his own life completely for the revolution." Jawaharlal Nehru adds: "Extraordinarily likable and friendly ... a man of integrity desiring peace...
...considers himself a man of the world: "Moscow is heroic," he will remark, jocosely, "but Paris is the joy of living." Ho Chi Minh is a kindly man, it seems, who calls his associates "Little Brother," while they call him "Uncle Ho." Yet Uncle Ho, it also seems, keeps his favorite Swallow's Nest-a rare and expensive delicacy made from the saliva of sea swallows-in his room so that he will not have to share it; he keeps Philip Morrises in one pocket for himself and passes poor local cigarettes from another...
Then there is the question of murder. In 1945 Uncle Ho's Communists killed off 5,000 Vietnamese Nationalists. The wives and children of the purged ones thronged before him pleading mercy, but Uncle Ho ordered troops to disperse them. In 1946 Ho's Communists turned on the Trotskyites. One Trotskyite leader, an old friend, sent Ho a telegram asking clemency; Uncle Ho privately replied that he did not know the Trotskyite-who was promptly shot. Uncle Ho publicly maintained his reputation as a kindly man by weeping at the loss of his friend and by having...